Privacy Tips

There's a lot of people, obviously including blackhatters, that don't want their personal information spewed on the web. But providing fake information can also sometimes get you into trouble, for example an online services company can give you the boot because you provided fake info. Even GoDaddy has been known to do that every now and then. Although when I asked EuroDNS.com, they removed all my personal information, except my name, from a European domain that I bought from them.

A good option would be to get an anonymous company, but that can be too expensive for some people, and for others just plain unnecessary.

There is however a third option. Get a mail forwarding address, a voicemail and a secondary email address.

I live in Europe, but if you were to do a WHOIS check on any of my domains you'd think I'm from the States. That's because I use a MyUS.com mail forwarding address for almost everything I do online that doesn't require physical products to be delivered. Heck, sometimes I even use it for that, if the products can only be delivered to the US.
With a premium account you can even get stuff delivered under different names, which can possibly used to anonymize your personal details even more.Bongous.com is also another good mail forwarding company that offer similar prices as MyUS.

For the phone details I use a free online voicemail from eVoice.com. It's really simple to use and the free version is sufficient for me as I don't get many calls from WHOIS lookups anyway.

As a secondary email I tend to use an account that has POP3 or IMAP enabled, so I can import the mail to my main webmail. These include Inbox.com and Gmail.

If you want a fax number, j2.com can provide one at a cost. But I almost never use a fax so I haven't tried it out. Can't vouch for them.

There you have it, a couple of ways you can get an extra layer of privacy for a cheap price.

If anyone has any other privacy tips, write them here!

PS! Two good privacy-related plugins for Firefox: KeyScrambler and TrackMeNot (use it at 10 queries per hour, or Google will ban you). Both of these are available at the official Firefox Add-On website.

Cheaper then anonymous company just for registering domains is whois guard which is overall cheap and its free on namecheap.

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For renewals too?

I used Domains By Proxy for a while, but then when I started to have 30+ domains, it's an extra $1.9 per domain, which means ~$60+ extra per year. I'd rather go with a $5 one-time fee for a mail forwarding address + free voicemail + free secondary email, for most domains. Now I only use services like WhoisGuard and DbP for gray area domains.

I used Domains By Proxy for a while, but then when I started to have 30+ domains, it's an extra $1.9 per domain, which means ~$60+ extra per year. I'd rather go with a $5 one-time fee for a mail forwarding address + free voicemail + free secondary email, for most domains. Now I only use services like WhoisGuard and DbP for gray area domains.

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Hey Beef,

Can you explain more about this? The math doesn't add up to me...all the mail forwarding address services I see are around $19 per month.

Can you explain more about this? The math doesn't add up to me...all the mail forwarding address services I see are around $19 per month.

Where can you get this for a $5 one-time fee?

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When I bought my MyUS.com Standard membership, I only had to pay a $5 sign-up fee, now it seems it costs $10, but it's still a one-time fee. Bongous.com still costs $5 to set-up and use as pay-per use. You also have option of a subscription which is $15/mo, then you get cheaper shipping rates.

it all depends on what you're doing, using any of those methods you can still be found if it's anything serious.

if you want to hide traffic from your ISP you can use a VPN service but, you can't be 100% anonymous on the internet or in anything you do really. it all depends on what you're doing and if it's worth going after you.

as for domain addresses, I just look up addresses to public mailbox locations such as "Mailbox Etc.." in the states and just use that as that as the address. I don't think they do any kind of detailed verifications, although I haven't really used false info on many domains.

If you need to make any purchases and cover your privacy for hosting or whatever you can use prepaid cards, you might know that.

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